Emoji and Self-Identity in Twitter Bios

Jinhang Li,Walid Magdy,Giorgos Longinos,Steven Wilson

doi:10.18653/v1/2020.nlpcss-1.22

Abstract

Emoji are widely used to express emotions and concepts on social media, and prior work has shown that users’ choice of emoji reflects the way that they wish to present themselves to the world. Emoji usage is typically studied in the context of posts made by users, and this view has provided important insights into phenomena such as emotional expression and self-representation. In addition to making posts, however, social media platforms like Twitter allow for users to provide a short bio, which is an opportunity to briefly describe their account as a whole. In this work, we focus on the use of emoji in these bio statements. We explore the ways in which users include emoji in these self-descriptions, finding different patterns than those observed around emoji usage in tweets. We examine the relationships between emoji used in bios and the content of users’ tweets, showing that the topics and even the average sentiment of tweets varies for users with different emoji in their bios. Lastly, we confirm that homophily effects exist with respect to the types of emoji that are included in bios of users and their followers.

Highlights

With the rise of social media usage and online textbased communication, emoji, a simple but powerfully expressive set of visual characters (Danesi, 2016), have become a hugely popular means to express emotions, moods, and feelings over computermediated communication (Kelly and Watts, 2015)
In the era of big data, with more and more people engaging with social media, researchers have begun to study the ways in which social media users include emoji in their posts, finding that emoji usage is associated with things like personality (Li et al, 2018), culture (Guntuku et al, 2019)
We examine the inclusion of emoji in Twitter bios, which are short (160 characters maximum) texts describing a Twitter account

Summary

Introduction

With the rise of social media usage and online textbased communication, emoji, a simple but powerfully expressive set of visual characters (Danesi, 2016), have become a hugely popular means to express emotions, moods, and feelings over computermediated communication (Kelly and Watts, 2015). We examine the inclusion of emoji in Twitter bios, which are short (160 characters maximum) texts describing a Twitter account. These bios are featured prominently on a user’s profile page, and given their limited length, users often use this space succinctly express the essential information about their accounts. We expect that the choice of emoji used in these bios will have a strong connection to a user’s online self-identity, or the way that they seek to portray themselves to others on a social media platform. Previous studies have shown that specific personality characteristics can be measured by analyzing linguistic behavior on social media using natural language processing techniques (Plank and Hovy, 2015). Twitter bios have been shown to be are useful in discovering other aspects of self-identity such as political and religious affiliations (Rogers and Jones, 2019)

Objectives

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion